# Casual sale exemption

Sales tax on the assets themselves, which some states charge and some call casual.

A buyer models the price, the fee and the [working capital](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/working-capital), and then a state asks for tax on the equipment it just bought. Whether it is owed turns on a rule with the opposite answer in the two states read. Ohio exempts a casual sale of property the seller bought for its own use and that was already subject to a sales or use tax, though cars, trucks and titled boats stay taxable. Washington charges the retail sales tax on a casual or isolated sale where the seller is engaged in business and registered, which nearly every seller is, and then exempts a transfer made by adjusting the beneficial interest in the business. That last clause is the asset-versus-equity decision arriving in a line nobody put in the model. Ask which the state does before the [letter of intent](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/loi) fixes the structure, because the answer moves real money and is not negotiable afterward.

In numbers: A $4,000,000 [asset purchase](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/asset-vs-stock-sale) with $1,200,000 allocated to equipment carries about $96,000 of tax at an 8% rate, and nothing at all in a state that treats the sale as casual.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/casual-sale-exemption
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt